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We Produce Rigorous ENT Research. But Are We Helping Anyone Make Policy?

We've been studying entrepreneurship for over three decades. We know that entrepreneurs create jobs, drive economic growth, and reduce poverty. Governments around the world spend billions on policies designed to support them. And yet, when my colleagues and I looked closely at what entrepreneurship research actually delivers to policymakers, what we found was both revealing and uncomfortable. Please read on for a summary of our just-published article "Public policy implications of entrepreneurship research."

The research–policy gap is real. And it is bigger than most of us want to admit.

What the Gap Actually Looks Like

My co-authors-Søren H. Jensen, Sascha Kraus, Jasna Poček, and Michele Pinelli-and I examined 4,247 articles published across 10 leading entrepreneurship journals between 2010 and 2020. That is a full decade of the best empirical work the field has to offer. Here is what we found: only 11.7% of those articles included explicit policy recommendations. And only 1.4%-60 articles out of 4,247-devoted even a subsection to discussing policy implications in any depth.

Let that land for a moment. One percent.

And when we looked closely at those 60 articles, the picture got more complicated. We used behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) to evaluate each one along four dimensions: methodological transparency, the specificity of policy and regulatory guidance, how much institutional change implementation would require, and how resource-intensive that implementation would be. The results were consistent. The research was generally methodologically transparent-that part, we do reasonably well. But when it came to telling policymakers what to do, who should do it, what it would cost, and whether it could realistically work, the articles fell short. Again and again.

Most policy implications, in other words, are performative. They exist to check a box, not to change policy. That is not irrelevance through disengagement-it is irrelevance through misalignment.

The Gap Has Two Sides

It is tempting to frame this as researchers not caring enough. That misses something important. The research–policy gap has both supply-side and demand-side causes.

On the supply side, most of us were not trained in policy design. We know how to build theory, test hypotheses, and report findings. We do not always know how to speak the language of policymakers-identifying who exactly should act, what resources they will need, how a recommendation fits the existing institutional environment, and how success would be evaluated. That language gap matters because an insight a policymaker cannot use is not really an insight at all.

On the demand side, few journals actively require policy implications. Academic career incentives reward publications, citations, and rankings-not influence on government reports or policy documents. If the system does not reward it, fewer researchers will invest in it. That is not a moral failing; it is a rational response to the environment we work in.

There is also a striking geographic divide in our data. Eighty-eight percent of the articles in our sample that included substantive policy implications came from European-based journals. U.S.-based journals, which represent four of the ten journals we studied, accounted for less than 15%. And here is the finding that surprised me most: the special issues we found that were explicitly devoted to entrepreneurship policy contained no explicit policy implications at all. Not one. Journals committed entire issues to the topic-and none of the articles told policymakers what to do.

What Impactful Policy Implications Actually Look Like

Here is the central insight from our study: policy implications only matter when they are both scientifically grounded and practically implementable. Methodological rigor is necessary but not sufficient. A recommendation built on transparent, replicable research still fails if it does not tell policymakers who is responsible for implementation, what resources they need, whether significant institutional change is required, and how outcomes will be evaluated.

The best examples we found in our sample combined rigorous empirical foundations with concrete, specific guidance. They identified target groups. They acknowledged trade-offs. They named the mechanisms through which the intervention would work. They considered the country-level and regional context. That is the standard we should hold ourselves to-not a vague suggestion that "policymakers should consider" something, but actual guidance that someone sitting in a ministry could act on.

How to Narrow the Gap

So what do we actually do about it? Four things.

1.     First, stop treating policy implications as an afterthought. Policy is part of the entrepreneurship domain-it always has been. If our research has nothing to say to policymakers, we need to ask whether we are asking the right questions in the first place. Journals that list policymakers among their target audiences need to start meaning it.

2.     Second, design research with real-world consequences in mind from day one. That means selecting problems where progress is possible, identifying the relevant actors, and thinking through what a policymaker would actually do with your findings before you write the first line of your paper-not in the last paragraph of the discussion section.

3.     Third, go beyond academic circles. Connect with practitioners and policymakers while you are still in the planning phase, not just when the paper is done. Existing policies are the equivalent of the extant literature in this space. You cannot improve on them if you do not understand them. Getting into the actual world of entrepreneurs and policymakers gives you something no dataset alone can: a feel for what is feasible.

4.     Fourth-and this is the hardest-learn the language of policy design. That means understanding the full policy cycle: formulation, implementation, and evaluation. It means writing recommendations that identify stakeholders, specify resource requirements, and address how a policy would be monitored and adjusted over time. Cosmetic changes to wording are not enough. Writing "policymakers should" followed by something vague is not a policy implication-it is a missed opportunity.

Journals have a role here, too. Several already emphasize societal impact in their mission statements-and the evidence suggests that editorial focus makes a real difference in what researchers produce. More journals need to raise their expectations.

The Bigger Picture

I want to be direct about one thing. I am not arguing that research should drive policy, or that academic findings should be the only input into the policymaking process. Politics matters. Context matters. Implementation feasibility matters. Policymakers often look for research that legitimizes decisions they have already made-we need to be clear-eyed about that.

But entrepreneurship research has enormous potential to improve the policies that shape the environments in which entrepreneurs operate. Right now, we are leaving most of that potential on the table.

Closing the gap requires changes on both sides: researchers who invest in understanding policy design, and journals and institutions that reward them for doing so. The field has built an impressive record of rigorous research over three decades. Now it is time to make that research matter beyond the pages of our journals.

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Herman Aguinis, Ph.D.
Avram Tucker Distinguished Scholar & Professor of Management
The George Washington University School of Business
Washington, DC
https://hermanaguinis.com/
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